INFANTICIDE (Hansard, 23 June 1965)

§ Mr. Leo Abse (Pontypool)

I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to amend the law relating to infanticide. Each year in this country about 20 mothers are brought to trial, usually at the assize courts, to face a charge that, in theory, can attract a sentence of life imprisonment. They are the disturbed women who, when they have recovered from the effects of childbirth or the effects of lactation, return to reality only to discover that the blessings of motherhood have evaded them, and that for them it has been a curse. A mother returns from her confused or her withdrawn condition to discover that she has killed her own child. Sometimes she has done this in the most ghastly circumstances.

It was a long and particularly hard struggle in the teeth of overwhelming judicial opinion before the law was changed even to give, as it does now, a grudging acknowledgement that babes can be slain, not out of criminal intent but out of mental illness. The main reason why any changes were made was not because of the increasing insight that came with expanding psychiatric knowledge, but because of the robust common sense of nineteenth-century juries. They, despite many admonitions by many judges, refused to bring in a guilty verdict that could send a temporarily insane woman to the gallows.

The history of those times makes it quite clear that juries knew that at or about the time of birth, dogs, cats, sows, white mice, rabbits—all of them—sometimes killed their own young, and they were not prepared to extend less compassion and concern to a mentally sick woman than they would to an excitable bitch. So they defied the judges, and defied them the more by refusing to behave as it was often said to be their duty to behave.

Yet before there was any formal recognition by the law of prevailing public opinion, many a wretched mother had to face a judge in a black cap, and be compelled to wait to see whether, in the end, after a long-drawn-out agony, she would receive a reprieve. It needed all the persuasiveness of the 1765 distinguished father of a distinguished Member of this House—the late Mr. Arthur Henderson—to cause the first faltering steps to be taken to alter what was certainly then an appallingly cruel law, and it needed the medical authority of Lord Dawson of Penn before the law reached even its present state.

The present law undoubtedly reflects yesteryears' struggle between those who were still tenaciously holding on to the punitive attitude and those who wanted the law to be informed by increased medical understanding, and an understanding in particular, of the post-natal mental condition of the mother. The law today still absurdly enjoins on the prosecution that at one and the same time it must show that the wrong-doing was done wilfully and that the wrongdoer was not responsible because the balance of her mind was disturbed as a result of birth or as a result of lactation, and that she had not been fully recovered from those effects.

The law today is in such a position that, the prosecution having proved the tumult of mind, in defiance of every canon of criminal responsibility, it is still decreed that the sick woman is to be treated as though she had committed manslaughter. It may be that one day, in a more rational and compassionate society, we shall have family courts in which mothers in this tragic predicament will no longer be regarded as people to whom the stigma of criminality should be attracted, and in which these mothers will be able to be dealt with and helped without the need to place a stigma on them.

In the meantime, my Bill would make the offence triable as it is not now, summarily, before the magistrates. It would also lay down that infanticide would not be an offence to which could be attached a penalty of imprisonment.

As the law now stands, the mother cannot be dealt with summarily before the magistrates. It is mandatory that a case of infanticide is taken on indictment and, as a consequence, is usually dealt with before the assize judges. The procedure results in appalling strain to the mother at the very moment when she should be receiving the maximum support to cope with the grievous knowledge that, in her temporary insanity, she has slain her own child.

1766 Sometimes the wretched woman, as a consequence of the present law, is brought before the magistrates two or three times for remand and for the taking of depositions. Sometimes, indeed, because the magistrates cannot deal with the matter with any finality, it means that she spends weeks inside prison waiting trial, albeit usually in a prison hospital. I therefore propose in my Bill that so that the woman should not have all this long strain of waiting for many weeks before being brought for trial, and then having to face all the pomp and paraphernalia of the assize court, it should be possible for the case to be disposed of speedily in the magistrates' court.

As the law stands now, the rite of the long-drawn-out agony having been endured, and the law satisfied that honour has been done to its majesty, it relents. In fact, to the credit of the judges, it seems that imprisonment is very rare. As far as I can see, no judge has imprisoned a woman, certainly since 1960, for this offence. These mothers have been put on probation, they have been dealt with by hospital orders, they have been given absolute or conditional discharges and, of course, all these ways of dealing with them would have been open to the magistrates if only they possessed the power to deal with cases of infanticide speedily in their own courts. This is what the Bill would seek to do.

No less distressing is the publicity surrounding the trials. Some of the macabre details are pedalled in a prurient Press in a way that adds to the damage which is already suffered, not only by the woman but also by the family. A woman who was in an acute state of depressive confusional insanity took a carving knife and cut off her baby's head, returned to sanity after surviving the present process of law and after psychiatric treatment, to discover that the terrible happening was known to all her neighbourhood. In fear that her children of school age would suffer, her husband was compelled to sell his business at a loss and move speedily to start life elsewhere in search of anonymity. I could catalogue many similar and other tragic cases.

Today, with our knowledge of mental illness, we do not expect to have retailed 1767 the bizarre conduct of the sick in our mental hospitals. Justice does not require a gruesome incident in the life of a mentally ill mother should be blazoned abroad. My Bill would seek to limit the publication of such details as would identify the mother in the same way as cases in the juvenile courts are reported so that those before the court are not to be identified. The woman who, in her madness, has extinguished the life she has created needs pity and help, and her family needs privacy in their sorrow. It is now time that the law desisted from its hunger for punishment and proffered compassion to the distraught mother.

I hope that the House will be generous enough to give me leave to bring in the Bill.